Public SourceMage Discussion List

[seth AT swoolley.homeip.net]

On Sun, Jan 07, 2007 at 10:56:35AM +0100, "Andra?? 'ruskie' Levstik" wrote:
> On 10:42:30 2007-01-07 seth AT swoolley.homeip.net wrote:
> > > Which we provide them with.... What we don't support is constantly
> > > installing a newer version of our system... 
> > 
> > You probably mean that we don't support iso-based upgrades.  We support 
> > in-situ upgrades the same as an iso-based binary distro would, but it's 
> > more like a debian update than an iso-based update.
> > 
> > We don't support "upgrade installs" where the iso/installer does the 
> > work because the package manager is strong enough to do it (unlike rpm).
> > 
> > We could always make cauldron handle upgrades, but it's almost 
> > pointless since we already have a better system.
> > 
> Acctually I was refering to the people that install a FRESH system every
> time a NEW stable release comes out with other distros. I know of people
> that install for example slackware 9.0 then when 9.1 comes out they backup
> their old config and do a FRESH install completly obliterating the old one.

That's just wrong on so many levels. :)

Actually, it really depends on the distro's accepted processes.  There really 
isn't that much of a difference between a fresh install and an smgl update in 
the end result.  Circumstances dictate the choice here (mostly which distro 
you use).

> 
> Personaly I think updating from ISO might be usefull in a limited scope.
> For example for a box that is not connected to the internet due to whatever
> reasons etc. But this can be done using our current system anyway.

summon has a feature that lets you grab the urls offline, but it's not
integrated into cast.

Cast can let you download all first.  If we added a switch that merely 
printed out urls and filenames and paused the process before casting, we 
could feed that to a script that runs on another box and you can write 
its output to a cd.

Then sorcery could be made to look at cascading locations in addition to 
/var/spool/sorcery.

Wouldn't be that hard.

Or we could just provide an iso with all the updated sources between 
stable updates.

> 
> > > Who said they need to upgrade? We provide a mechanism to ONLY update
> > > for security fixes so there really isn't much to this. If they wish
> > > it so they can also update the rest but it can be limited to security
> > > only.
> > 
> > This isn't really supported.  Yes, it is supported for 
> > intra-stable-cycles, but outside of a stable cycle, we only support 
> > security updates working on the current stable grimoire.
> > 
> > When a new stable grmimoire comes out all new security updates will be 
> > in context with the new stable, when it's tested anyways.  People are 
> > free to continue managing a system that has really old basesystem,
> > etc., but we can't claim it's tested when, for example, they need to
> > update sendmail and all the deps are different from how the sendmail
> > patch or update was tested.
> > 
> True. But I think for security fixes we first need to start checking what
> updates acctually qualfy as security fixes I'm guessing there's a big pile
> of them that weren't marked as such simply because nobody noticed them and
> were updated during the course of a normal update.

Every now and then emrys goes through and makes sure critical updates are 
marked correctly, but I'm sure some may slip through.

I'll start going back to this role once the stable release process is out 
of my hands.

> 
> > > The only thing here I think is that we should still provide an
> > > unversioned symlink to the latest stable tarball that way it's
> > > possible to keep up to date with stable releases without needing to
> > > switch them constantly.
> > 
> > We've always done this.  I don't expect this to change.
> > 
> Wasn't aware of this.

That's because you don't run stable grimoire.